Memories are thoughts that arise. They’re not realities. Only when you believe that they are real, then they have the power over you. But when you realize it’s just another thought arising about the past, then you can have a spacious relationship with that thought. The thought no longer has you in its grip.

If you’re doing a biography, you try to stay as accurate as possible to reality. But you really don’t know what was going on in the person’s mind. You just know what was going on in the minds of people around him.

A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.

Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.

Prayer is not an old woman’s idle amusement. Properly understood and applied, it is the most potent instrument of action.

If I relaxed, if I took my foot off the gas, I would probably die.

Tell me what you like and I’ll tell you what you are.

There are hunters, and there are victims. By your discipline, cunning, obedience, and alertness, you will decide if you are a hunter or a victim.

The truth is that you can only come to know God when you give up the past and the future in your mind and merge totally into the now, because God is always here now.

These men ask for just the same thing, fairness, and fairness only. This, so far as in my power, they, and all others, shall have.

Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.

If every day you practice walking and sitting meditation and generate the energy of mindfulness and concentration and peace, you are a cell in the body of the new Buddha. This is not a dream but is possible today and tomorrow.

Everyone who wills can hear the inner voice. It is within everyone.

A black person grows up in this country – and in many places – knowing that racism will be as familiar as salt to the tongue. Also, it can be as dangerous as too much salt. I think that you must struggle for betterment for yourself and for everyone.

Your net worth to the world is usually determined by what remains after your bad habits are subtracted from your good ones.

I know from personal experience how damaging it can be to live with bitterness and unforgiveness. I like to say it’s like taking poison and hoping your enemy will die. And it really is that harmful to us to live this way.

When I understand myself, I understand you, and out of that understanding comes love.

September 11 shocked many Americans into an awareness that they had better pay much closer attention to what the U.S. government does in the world and how it is perceived. Many issues have been opened for discussion that were not on the agenda before. That’s all to the good.

When we speak of faith – the faith that can move mountains – we are not speaking of faith in general but of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.

I really believed that fear is contagious.

I believe God’s keeping the records, and I believe you will be rewarded even in this life. Somehow, some way, God will make it up to you. It may be He protected you from an accident you never knew. You can’t give God something without God giving you more in return, whether it’s peace or joy or satisfaction.

I am tough, but deep inside my toughness, I like to let people know I’m an old-fashioned mama’s boy.

Though she be but little, she is fierce.

The philosophical question before us is, when we make an observation of our track in the past, does the result of our observation become real in the same sense that the final state would be defined if an outside observer were to make the observation?

Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.

To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another person.

I don’t really read a lot of newspapers. I don’t pay attention to what is being said or written about me. I’ve had lots of experiences in the past when I got too much into it. That sort of diverts your focus.

Have you not noticed that love is silence? It may be while holding the hand of another, or looking lovingly at a child, or taking in the beauty of an evening. Love has no past or future, and so it is with this extraordinary state of silence.

Eventually you get to this point where you understand what you want to do and get across and sound like.

You can live your life angry, bitter, mad at somebody or even guilty, not letting go of your own mistakes, but you won’t receive the good things God has in store.

The walls we build around us to keep sadness out also keeps out the joy.

A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.

The greatest happiness is to know the source of unhappiness.

Mastery passes often for egotism.

All those who believe in psychokinesis – raise my hand.

If you haven’t forgiven yourself something, how can you forgive others.

I have as much authority as the Pope, I just don’t have as many people who believe it.

An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.

Christmas morning, I’m going to open presents with my kids. I’m going to take pictures of them opening the presents. Then I’m going to come to the Staples Center and get ready to work.

If you abandon the present moment, you cannot live the moments of your daily life deeply.

When the best leader’s work is done the people say, ‚We did it ourselves.‘

The thing about delirium is you think it’s great, but it actually isn’t.

Common Sense is that which judges the things given to it by other senses.

A lot of football success is in the mind. You must believe you are the best and then make sure that you are.

It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet.

Meditation has been a loyal friend to me. It has helped me write my books.

I am not afraid of an army of lions led by a sheep; I am afraid of an army of sheep led by a lion.

Men do not accept their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and worship those whom they have tortured to death.

I think that I am better than the people who are trying to reform me.

There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.

Anger, if not restrained, is frequently more hurtful to us than the injury that provokes it.

Either you run the day or the day runs you.

We are second-hand people. We have lived on what we have been told, either guided by our inclinations, our tendencies, or compelled to accept by circumstances and environment. We are the result of all kinds of influences, and there is nothing new in us, nothing that we have discovered for ourselves: nothing original, pristine, clear.

I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.

Everyone assumes I practise all of my own laws but I don’t. I think anybody who did would be a horrible ugly person to be around.

I felt like, for so many years – and I still even feel it – as a girl, you can’t really expect to go on stage and dress like a boy and jump around and scream with the audience and mosh and stuff, and every time that happens, I feel really proud.

I think a big test we all face in life on a regular basis is that discouragement test. Life’s not always fair, but I believe if you keep doing the right thing, God will get you to where you are.

Boldness be my friend.

Black Power is giving power to people who have not had power to determine their destiny.

Everything I’ve been thinking, every vision, even down to every shot I throw, it just ends up here in reality. Whether it was in a fight and how to react or whether it was in a stadium with screaming fans or whether I was in a fancy car or the best clothes ever, I always put myself somewhere.

Faith is different from proof; the latter is human, the former is a Gift from God.